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Green Lantern Movie News

With a planned release date of June 17, 2011, the cast and creative team behind a live-action Green Lantern movie has just about filled out. Martin Campbell is directing (Homicide: Life on the Street, GoldenEye, The Mask of Zorro, Casino Royale) from a script worked on by Greg Berlanti (Everwood, Dirty Sexy Money, Eli Stone, Brothers and Sisters), Michael Green (Smallville, Heroes), Michael Goldenberg, and Marc Guggenheim (FlashForward, Law & Order, Dick Wolf’s Dragnet). This certainly seems a good team to put together a superhero movie, particular one about Hal Jordan, most renowned member of an intergalactic peacekeeping corps.

Currently shooting in New Orleans, Ryan Reynolds is playing Jordan, the sometimes cocky yet genuinely courageous test pilot who came upon a dying alien, Abin Sur, previous guardian of space Sector 2814, which includes Earth. Sur gave Jordan his power ring, limited only by the wearer’s imagination and willpower.

While the ring has overshadowed Jordan as a character at times, the best portrayals of Jordan accentuate his strength of character without the ring. Darwin Cooke’s New Frontier comes to mind, which places Jordan’s becoming a Green Lantern against an historically accurate 1950s-60s backdrop (Jordan debuted as Green Lantern in October 1959).

Gossip Girl‘s Blake Lively is playing Jordan’s love interest and boss, Carol Ferris. Lively is admittedly young for the role, but she apparently had such an impressive audition that she was cast.

Playing the villains are Peter Sarsgaard (Elrod in In The Electric Mist) as the psychically formidable Hector Hammond, British actor Mark Strong (Lord Henry Blackwood in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes) as Sinestro, who comes to wield a yellow power ring opposing Jordan’s green.

On March 25, 2010, Angela Bassett was announced in the role of government agent Amanda Waller.

There have been many attempts to bring Green Lantern to live-action feature film and TV. Most of them are best forgotten. This one seems to have the best chance of box office success.